And Now: A Serial TV Show, From the Lego Movie Guys

Chris Miller and Phil Lord, the guys who brought you The Lego Movie and Last Man on Earth, have a Midas touch for nearly everything these days, and now they’re going to test it out on what might be their biggest challenge yet: turning radio into television.

Six years after the This American Life TV series ended its quiet run on Showtime, Serial—the most popular podcast of all time—is ready to make the leap to television, with Lord and Miller and Fox 21 Television Studios optioning the rights to the show. The plan is to follow Serial host Sarah Koenig and the rest of the team as they follow a case for a new season of the show; the story is yet to be determined, but it won’t be the story of Adnan Sayed and the murder of Hae-Min Lee, which so captivated listeners when Serial debuted last year.

Part of the obsession with Serial was due to the insight we had in its making; the season wasn’t complete when episodes first began airing, and Koening and her associates would talk us through their process, doubling back on leads and hunting down interviewees that we’d been told about weeks before. We all got to be detectives listening to it, and the proposed Serial series could, as a result, be more like Columbo than the This American Life show. Her voice alone made Sarah Koening a pop culture phenomenon worthy of an S.N.L. parody. Why wouldn’t the leap to TV just further fuel the addiction?